Tag Archives: Social

For those of you who haven’t had one of my seminars on using PowerPoint to create powerful image quotes for your social media feed; now’s the time to get out into the garden with your camera phone and take a few photos.

Chrysanthemum

You need to create a stockpile of good background photos that you can use for fresh quotes. And summertime in your garden is a great time and place to do this.

Closeups of plants and flowers make a great background for a variety of quotes – like this one I found on the Olds Municipal Library Facebook feed.

A wonderful quote from Jo Walton.

You can see how they use a transparent overlay over part of the picture to help the text stand out.

You may not have an immediate need for those pictures, but you can set them aside for later use, like this image of purple pink chrysanthemums (my chrysanthemums are looking particularly lovely this year, due to the fact I’ve just bought them).

The colour of these flowers, will do nicely for a different Valentines’ Day image quote.

You don’t need a fancy camera to get these pictures, the camera on your phone will do just fine. But do make sure you take your pictures in both horizontal and vertical orientations to make sure you have more layout options later on.

When you don’t know how you’ll be using those photos, options are very good.

Don’t just focus on flowers (hehe, see what I did there), leaves and foliage are useful too.

Hey! I think I see a face in there!

Don’t forget that the same picture can be used multiple ways, once you start throwing colour filters and special effects at it.

Left is original photo – the right has the saturation cranked up.

Oh, and that image has been flipped, since I like the leaves appearing on the right side of the photo better.

A final tip, when saving your image quotes, use the PNG format, it creates fewer artifacts (small jiggly lines that make text harder to read) than JPEG.

Finally, be sure to create your image quotes in the right dimensions Facebook, Twitter etc. I have have some pre-sized templates that you can use.

The Rijkmuseum in Amerstdam has digitized its collection. All of its works are free to use. Its’ policy “If you use our images for publication, then we request that you acknowledge the source (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). We would also like to receive a copy of the publication for our library.”

Kaboom pics claim to fame, is that the colour palette of each photo is extracted for you, useful if you are planning coordinating backgrounds or print materials.

Fancy Crave All photos published on Fancycrave are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license which grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use photos from Fancycrave for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or Fancycrave.

I really didn’t want to put Fake News in the headline of this post, but really that is what this post is all about. How to use a reverse image search when you are on a mobile device, so that you can spot a Fake News story.

Recently a friend shared a Facebook story that just didn’t add up. The photo was of a man in hazmat style suit purportedly cleaning up an oil spill in North Dakota. You can see a version of the photo at the top of the article. The story implied some type of conspiracy that was preventing news of the oil spill from being covered.

A Reverse Image Search told a different story

This didn’t make sense to me, especially as I had been following news of an oil spill that was not on the scale shown by the photo. However a few minutes with a reverse image search showed the picture had been taken in China, and had nothing to do with North Dakota. This made the rest of the story even more unlikely.

Performing your search

A reverse image search is easy to do on a mobile device although iOS users need to download the Chrome browser app first. Sorry, but Safari doesn’t support Googles image search file upload.

With that in mind here are the steps to performing your reverse image search:

Save a copy of the photo locally, this might mean taking a screenshot depending on the posts’ privacy settings. Here you can see the photo I used. Note that the poster changed the photo to Black and White in order to make it harder to search. Didn’t work though!

Black and White photo of oil cleanup effort – altered from original

Open Chrome and go to www.google.ca

Either google.ca or google.com will work

Click the Images link on the page to go to Image search. Currently that link is in the top right corner of the screen.

You are in Image Search, when the camera icon is in the search bar.

Click the Camera icon to see your options for searching using an image file.
Google Image search options. Search by pasting the URL of the image or by uploading the file.

Choose the Upload an Image tab.

Uploading an Image

Click the Choose Filebutton.

You will be offered a choice of taking a new photo or going to your Photo Library. Select your photo library, and locate the image you saved previously.

The file is uploaded automatically and the search is performed.
Reverse Image Search Results initial screen

Make sure you scroll down the page looking for the Pages that include matching images.

Reverse Image Search – Pages that include matching images.

Reverse Image searches are amazing

Frankly, I was astounded that the image was located even after it had been changed. Reverse image searches are a powerful tool! Whether from malicious intent or the desire to give a story emotional impact, there are all too many posts on the net where images are misused. Don’t be fooled.

Adding a public Google Calendar is a great way to present activities in an easily shared fashion.

To add a Google Calendar to your Facebook Page, you will first need a Facebook Page (not a personal profile page) and a Google (Gmail) account.

Create the Google Calendar

Make a public calendar. This can be an existing calendar or one created for this purpose.

Make the Calendar Public

After the calendar has been created, click on the drop-down arrow beside the calendar name and choose Calendar Settings. The Calendar Details page will open.

Click the Share this Calendar link.

Making a Google Calendar Public

Enable the Make this calendar public checkbox.

Click the Save button.

The calendar view will be displayed.

Customize the Calendar HTML Code

Return to the calendar’s details page.

Click on the drop-down arrow beside the calendar name and choose Calendar Settings. The Calendar Details page will open:

Locate the Embed this Calendar section

Scroll down the page and find the Embed This Calendar section.

Click on the Customize the color, size, and other options link.
A new window or tab will open, the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper:

Google Embeddable Calendar Helper

A preview of your calendar is visible. You can change the title, default view and other elements of the calendar. The view will update to show you what your calendar will look like when the changes are applied. If you do make changes, be sure to press the UPDATE HTML button to ensure those changes are reflected in the HTML.

Be prepared to copy and paste the HTML code. However, do not do so yet.

You will be routed to the Set Up Tab view. Click the Set Up Tab button.

Follow the instructions in the index.html area

Copy the HTML code that you customized previously for your Google calendar into the index.html area.
Replace the instructions with your code (or the instructions will appear along with your calendar).

The Static HTML window. Paste your calendar code here.

Click the Save & Publish button.

Name the Tab

From your Facebook Page, select Settings.

Return to Settings to Name the Tab

Click on the Apps category on the left.

Apps that have been added will be listed on the right.

From the Static HTML: iframe tabs app section, click on the Edit Settingslink.

The Edit Static HTML: iframe tabs Settings dialog box will appear:

The Edit Static HTML: iframe tabs Settings dialog box

Enter the name of your calendar in the Custom Tab Name: text box.

Click the Save button.

Click the OK button.

You can also add an image that will appear beside the link on the right hand side of your page.

Additional Ideas

Now the App code has been connected to your Facebook page, additional tabs can be added. Any piece of embeddable HTML code can be used. For example; on-line catalog search code. To add additional tabs, return to the page Settings and select Apps.

Click the Go to App link for the Static HTML: iframe tabs app.

The app will walk you through creating an additional tab.

Woobox has an app called Tweet Feed for Pages, which will embed your Twitter feed into a tab on your page. The concept is similar to embedding a Google Calendar. Woobox’s app will walk you through the process of adding the tab.

I have a Social Media project on the go (waves at https://twitter.com/librarytrustees) that is going to involve tweeting sections of existing documents.

I really hate counting characters. So I decided it was time to make myself a tool for the job.

Original Document and Result after Tweet Cruncher is run on the selected text

You can see above what I have; the selected area of the original document is highlighted in varying colours, corresponding to the resulting text broken up into tweets. Additionally, I have inserted my chosen hashtag and a count of the sequence of tweets.

Tweet Cruncher Dialog

The length of the tweets and the Hashtag are entered in a dialog box when the Tweet Cruncher runs. This information is saved with the document, for consistency with subsequent tweets. The Tweets are not exactly the tweet length; I’ve added a bit of code to “round off” each tweet to whole words. The hashtag and sequence count are additional to the length.

And realistically, there will still be editing for content and meaning. Nevertheless, this tool should save me a ton of counting and get the project going faster.

I just came across a new free photo site called https://unsplash.com/ if you are creating visuals for your library’s social media feed, they have great pictures of books and people reading. Perfect for combining pictures and quotes. I was inspired by the picture below:

Books Everywhere

So I headed off to the internet to find a quote that I thought was perfect for these random stacks of books.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been sharing tips for using PowerPoint for social media. Which leads naturally to asking about using Google Slides the same way.

And Google Slides offers comparable features; in particular it does support saving slides as JPG’s and custom dimensions.

What doesn’t Slides have? The photo editing tools and artistic filters that come with PowerPoint are not available, so you’ll have to pre-edit in another application. And you’ll find that your capabilities are limited on the mobile versions of Slides, so you’ll be forced back to the desktop version.

I’ve mentioned it before, but PowerPoint can be a handy graphic editing tool. Especially when you want to combine pictures and text. The question is; how do you get perfectly sized pictures every time?

Most people don’t play with the Page Setup options other than to swap their slides between a 4:3/16:9 ratio. However you can input your own custom dimensions.

Make your own Custom Sized PowerPoint Templates

Go to the Designribbon and open the Page Setupdialog box. The last choice in the Slides sized fordrop down is Custom. Once this is selected you can input your own dimensions (within limits). To create the Twitter header photo template, I researched the dimensions of a Twitter header photo (500px by 1500px). Then I used this website to convert the pixel measurement to centimeters. The website also converts to inches, if that is your preferred measurement.

Now I can easily size my photos for Twitter! (Or Facebook, or Pinterest etc.)

The Rijkmuseum in Amerstdam has digitized its collection. All of its works are free to use. Its’ policy “If you use our images for publication, then we request that you acknowledge the source (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). We would also like to receive a copy of the publication for our library.”